‘What is a kibosh?’ asked a German medical friend of my husband’s, when the word cropped up. No one knew, though we were certain it was the kibosh and it was put on things.
All our lives, the earliest citation for the word had been from Dickens’s Sketches by Boz (1836): ‘ “Hoo-roar,” ejaculates a pot-boy in a parenthesis, “put the kye-bosk on her, Mary”.’ The entry for kibosh in the Oxford English Dictionary is not fully updated, but the online edition has cleared up that strange k. In the first edition of the Sketches, it was spelt kye-bosh, later doubtless misprinted kye-bosk. Someone in the journal Notes & Queries had in 1901 suggested a Yiddish origin, others an Irish one. Some argued that since Dickens was writing about Seven Dials, which was by the 1830s very Irish, it could not be Yiddish.
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